A paralegal opens a new Defense Base Act file. The injured worker was an information technology specialist supporting a secure network at a base in the Gulf. The employer line on the intake sheet reads one word: Peraton. That single word hides years of corporate reshuffling. Peraton did not exist before 2017, yet the work your client performed may trace back through two or three earlier company names.
This is the recurring trap with intelligence and IT primes. The name on the paystub rarely matches the name on the insurance policy. It often does not match the name in Department of Labor claim records either. ClaimTrove records list 13 Defense Base Act cases recorded under the exact name Peraton across the cumulative 2001 to 2024 reporting period. That figure understates the real exposure, because earlier claims sit under predecessor names.
For a claimant attorney, the stakes are concrete. You need the carrier that was on the risk on the date of injury. You need to know whether that risk sat with a commercial insurer or with the employer itself under a self-insurance authorization. You need it before the filing deadline closes. This profile explains how Peraton's intelligence and IT footprint, its self-insured question, and its naming history shape a Defense Base Act investigation.
Who is Peraton and what does it do overseas?
Peraton is a federal technology and national security services company headquartered in Reston, Virginia. Publicly reported history places its formation in 2017, when Veritas Capital carved out and rebranded the government IT services business of Harris Corporation. The company then scaled quickly through acquisitions in 2021.
Two 2021 deals reshaped the company. Peraton acquired Perspecta, a large federal IT contractor. It also absorbed the IT services and mission support business of Northrop Grumman. Each of those transactions brought thousands of employees and existing government contracts under one roof.
The overseas work is what triggers Defense Base Act exposure. Peraton supports the intelligence community, defense communications, cyber operations, space and signals work, and mission IT for combatant commands. Much of this happens at embassies, intelligence facilities, and forward bases outside the United States. A systems engineer or linguist-support technician at one of those sites can fall squarely under the Act.
ClaimTrove records return 37 SAM.gov entity registrations that match the Peraton name. By contrast, only two overseas prime contract awards are recorded under the exact name Peraton. That gap is a signal, not an error. It reflects how much of the overseas footprint still sits under predecessor and subsidiary names rather than the parent brand.
Scale is part of what makes this hard. Peraton employs a large workforce spread across dozens of program sites, many of them classified or restricted. A single overseas program can span several task orders, each with its own place of performance. The person on your intake form saw the Peraton logo on a badge and nothing more. The badge tells you almost nothing about which policy covered the site.
Does the Defense Base Act even cover IT and intelligence work overseas?
Some adjusters argue that a desk-bound IT role does not belong under the Defense Base Act. That argument fails on the statute. The Act, codified at 42 U.S.C. section 1651, turns on where the work happens and under what contract, not on how dangerous the job looks.
If your client worked outside the United States under a contract with a US government agency, the Act generally reaches the injury. A network engineer at an overseas intelligence facility qualifies on the same footing as a guard at the gate. The zone of special danger doctrine can extend coverage even to some off-duty injuries in these settings.
This matters for Peraton because so much of its work is technical and administrative. Attorneys who screen out these claims on instinct leave valid cases on the table. The correct question is never whether the job looked combat-adjacent. The correct question is the location and the contract.
Why does a self-insured posture change how a DBA claim is handled?
The Defense Base Act extends the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act to overseas government contractors. Under that framework, an employer secures compensation in one of two ways. It buys a policy from a carrier authorized by the Department of Labor, or it obtains authorization to self-insure and pays benefits directly.
Section 32 of the Longshore Act, codified at 33 U.S.C. section 932, governs that choice. Large, financially strong contractors sometimes qualify to self-insure. When they do, there is no separate insurance company standing behind the claim. The employer is the payer of record, and a third-party administrator usually handles the day-to-day file.
This changes your investigation in three ways. First, the entity you name as the responsible party may be the employer itself, not an insurer. Second, the correspondence and benefit checks come from a claims administrator that is not the carrier. Third, the Department of Labor authorized list that names carriers also names authorized self-insurers. ClaimTrove loads all 637 of those authorized entries, tagged as either an insurer or a self-insured employer.
The same pattern appears across the large technology primes. Our profile of how SAIC self-insurance changes a DBA investigation walks through what a self-insured file looks like in practice. The lesson for Peraton is caution. You cannot assume Peraton is self-insured, and you cannot assume it is not. The posture must be verified for the specific injury date.
Technology and services companies also split and recombine in ways that move the coverage question. The story of why the SAIC split makes Leidos carrier identification difficult shows how a single corporate event can hand the same work to a new insurer. Peraton sits in the same category of contractor, assembled from pieces of other companies.
How do Peraton's predecessor names fracture the DBA claim history?
Peraton is a stack of former companies. The Harris IT services business formed the base in 2017. Perspecta arrived in 2021, and Perspecta itself was assembled from earlier firms including the DXC US public sector unit, Vencore, and KeyPoint. The Northrop Grumman IT and mission support business joined the same year.
Each of those entities filed Defense Base Act claims under its own name while it existed. Each carried its own insurance program. An injury in 2014 or 2015 almost certainly sits under a predecessor name and a predecessor carrier, not under Peraton. The parent brand is simply too new to hold the older claim history.
This is why alias resolution matters so much for this employer. ClaimTrove currently maps 237 alias relationships across the platform, yet the automated set does not yet fold every Peraton predecessor into one canonical group. That gap mirrors the broader challenge covered in our analysis of how defense contractor consolidation reshapes DBA coverage, where each merger scatters the paper trail further.
Intelligence-support work compounds the problem. Linguist, analyst, and technical-support roles are frequently staffed through layered subcontracts. The same difficulty appears in our look at why linguist and intelligence-support contractors are the hardest carrier traces. For a Peraton worker, the actual employing entity may be a subcontractor two tiers below the prime.
What do federal contract and registration records reveal about Peraton?
Federal records are the backbone of any carrier trace, but they demand careful reading for a company like this. ClaimTrove holds 43,300 overseas prime contract awards and hundreds of thousands of federal entity registrations. Peraton appears across these sets, though often under the fragmented pattern described above.
The 37 SAM.gov registrations matching Peraton carry the identifiers that survive name changes. Each registration exposes a UEI and a CAGE code. Those identifiers let you match a contract to a corporate entity even when the trade name shifts. Matching by identifier rather than by name is the single most reliable technique for this profile.
Registration status is a second clue that attorneys overlook. A predecessor entity may show an expired or inactive registration long after its work ended. That does not erase the coverage that existed when your client was injured. It simply means the corporate shell moved, merged, or wound down. The policy that answers for the claim is fixed to the injury date, not to whether the entity still files paperwork today.
Classified work adds one more wrinkle. Intelligence contracts often mask the place of performance and the true contract value in public data. This is common across the consulting and intelligence primes. Our profile of why Booz Allen Hamilton overseas claims surprise most attorneys covers the same blind spot, where the public record shows far less than the real overseas footprint.
Subaward chains close some of that gap. When Peraton or a predecessor served as a subcontractor, the prime contractor's records may reveal the place of performance and the funding agency. That agency matters, because some agencies historically mandated a specific Defense Base Act carrier for a bounded period. Reading those chains is where a manual investigation gets slow.
What warnings should you flag on a Peraton file?
A few conditions deserve a note in the file before you send your first letter. The first is the acquisition date. If your client's injury predates a merger, confirm which entity was the employer and which insurance program was in force at that moment. The name your client uses today may not be the name that answers for the claim.
The second is the self-insurance question. If the responsible party turns out to be the employer rather than a carrier, the correspondence will come from a claims administrator. Do not treat that administrator as the insurer. The party that owes benefits is the self-insured employer standing behind the file, and your pleadings should name it correctly.
The third is the funding agency behind the contract. Intelligence and IT work is sometimes funded through an agency that used a mandated carrier for a defined window of years. If the injury date lands inside that window, the carrier answer may be set by the contract rather than by the open market. Missing that detail sends attorneys chasing the wrong insurer.
The fourth is the subcontractor layer. When your client was employed by a firm working under Peraton rather than by Peraton directly, the primary coverage sits with that lower-tier employer. The prime and the funding agency can still matter for statutory liability, but the first policy to reach is the subcontractor's.
How do you resolve Peraton's DBA carrier by period?
The resolution follows a disciplined sequence. Start with the date of injury, because that date controls everything that follows. A 2015 injury and a 2023 injury can point to entirely different entities and entirely different carriers, even for the same worker at the same site.
Next, identify which corporate entity held the relevant contract on that date. Resolve the predecessor or subsidiary name to its parent. Then check whether that entity secured coverage through an authorized carrier or through self-insurance for that period. Finally, weight every carrier signal by how close it sits to the injury date.
Doing this by hand across four or five predecessor names, thousands of contract records, and a self-insurance question can consume days. ClaimTrove runs the same sequence in one pass. It resolves aliases and subsidiaries, checks the authorized carrier and self-insured lists, and ranks the likely carrier by period with the evidence behind each match. Run Peraton through ClaimTrove to get the carrier-by-period answer in minutes instead of days.